Accessibility Issue Comes to a Head

by Carol Sliwa

From the Editor: Many of us have heard vaguely that the National Federation
of the Blind was suing Target because of accessibility problems with the company's
Web site. On May 8, 2006, the magazine Computerworld published an article
about the case and the frustrating problem that underlies it. The reporter did
an excellent job of getting the story and presenting it both clearly and fairly.
To see the photographs that accompany the article and to read the sidebars,
go to the following Web addresses: <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111219>,
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111221>,
and <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=111220>.
Here is the text of the article:

Bruce Sexton Jr. wants to be able to access the same Web content that anyone
else can. Because he can't, he now finds himself at the center of a potentially
precedent-setting legal fight over Web site accessibility.

Sexton, who is legally
blind, relies on software that reads his PC's screen from left to right and
top to bottom, skipping ahead when he uses keyboard-based shortcuts. When he
visits Target Corp.'s Web site, a robotic voice announces staccato-style the
presence of alternative text to describe images of the retailer's logo and its
"Target dog" mascot.

But the screen-reader software
doesn't read the weekly list of special offers on Target's Web site, Sexton
said. He can't tell whether the numbers he hears on other parts of the home
page correspond to products, files, or something else. Deeper into the site
he doesn't know which item goes with which price.

"It's difficult to
find anything," Sexton said. As a result he no longer tries to buy goods
from the Target site, which for a long time he couldn't do anyway because, he
said, it required the use of a mouse.

Sexton has joined the National
Federation of the Blind (NFB) as a plaintiff in a lawsuit that charges Target
with violating the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and California's
Unruh Civil Rights Act and Disabled Persons Act. The lawsuit, scheduled for
a hearing next month [June] at U.S. District Court in San Francisco, could have
a broad impact because Target's site is hardly the only one that could be accused
of having access barriers, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.

Web 2.0 Challenge

The move from text-based to visually oriented Web content has been tough on
the blind, and now there's a new threat on the horizon. The shift to dynamic
Web 2.0 technology, which Gartner Inc. predicts will be pervasive by the end
of next year, could exacerbate the problem of inaccessible sites.

A Web 2.0 application might
make use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Dynamic HTML to update
information in a table without having to refresh an entire Web page. But screen
readers, magnifiers, and other assistive technology may not know which parts
of the page have changed unless developers take steps to make sure the tools
can glean that information.

"It's very, very,
very scary," said Jeff Bishop, an application systems analyst at the University
of Arizona in Tucson. "Before, so what? You had a missing [alternative-text]
tag, but at least you knew there was an image. You could click on it, and maybe
you could figure out what it was. Now you don't even know where to click. You
don't know how to interact."

Bishop, who is blind, and
other advocates for people with disabilities aren't expecting an immediate fix.
"We want to make sure companies are at least hearing what our concerns
are," he said. "I'm not looking for a solution tomorrow. Even if it
takes two years, that's fine with me, as long as I know they're working on it."

But it's unclear whether
many companies are doing so. IBM, joined by other vendors, is leading a dynamic
accessible Web content initiative within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
One proposal outlines a development syntax for mapping information about the
elements of Web applications to an operating system's accessibility API so screen
readers and other assistive technology will know what has changed on a Web page.
A second proposal details the means for adding semantic role information to
a Web application so screen readers can identify rich objects, such as menus
and tab panels, on pages.

But the proposals are still
in draft form, and adoption remains uncertain. The Mozilla Foundation added
support for the technology starting with its Firefox 1.5 browser. Microsoft
Corp., however, has said its upcoming Internet Explorer 7.0 release won't support
it, and the company has made no commitments for future editions of the browser.

Gartner analyst Ray Valdes
has found that Fortune 500 companies have a very low level of awareness about
making their public Web sites accessible. Most haven't modified their Web design
and production methods and aren't thinking about fixing their current sites
because they assume that doing so would be too costly, he said. They also haven't
bothered to buy tools that could help them improve accessibility, Valdes said.

The W3C released accessibility
guidelines for Web-authoring tools more than six years ago, and it isn't aware
of a single product that is fully compliant, said Judy Brewer, director of the
consortium's Web accessibility initiative. But Brewer added that many of the
newer authoring tools do have features that provide more support for producing
accessible content. "And users should demand even better," she said.

Slow Demand

There are also evaluation tools that can assess a Web site's accessibility.
One of the leading vendors of evaluation tools, Watchfire Corp., has no more
than seventy U.S.-based corporate customers and thirty international users,
largely from the governmental and financial sectors, for its enterprise-grade
tool, according to Mike Weider, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company's chief
technology officer.

"We've long expected
the accessibility market to grow more than it has. It really hasn't taken off,"
Weider said. But the NFB-Target case could change that, he added.

The allegations made against
Target by the NFB and Sexton have set the stage for a court showdown that could
finally clear up the murky legal question of whether the ADA, which was enacted
in 1990, before the dawn of the Internet era, applies to Web sites. The lawsuit
claims that, because Target's site is difficult if not impossible for the blind
to use, the retailer is denying them equal access to the goods and services
it provides to customers without disabilities. The NFB this week plans to file
a motion for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to order Target to make
its Web site accessible promptly.

Target two weeks ago updated
a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that the laws in question don't apply
to Web sites because they aren't "physical" places of public accommodation.
The Minneapolis-based retailer further claimed that applying the California
statutes to its Web site, which is accessible to consumers countrywide, would
violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Mazen Baswari, a lawyer at Berkeley, California-based Disability Rights Advocates,
a co-counsel for the plaintiffs, contended that the ADA applies to any public
place where commercial activity occurs--including Web sites. And even if the
law didn't provide such blanket coverage, it would apply to Target's site because
www.target.com is integrated with the retailer's brick-and-mortar stores, Baswari
said.

Secil Watson, senior vice
president of customer experience for the Internet services group at Wells Fargo
& Co., said a good time for a company to think about making its site accessible
is when it's planning a major redesign. It's "the right thing to do,"
she said.
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo four years ago began its accessibility push
for people who are blind or visually impaired by making improvements to its
most popular pages. But Watson said it was a major restructuring a year later
that produced the most critical improvement: template-based pages that helped
to enforce design and development consistency. "What was good for the people
with disabilities was good for everybody," she said.

Wells Fargo used the W3C's
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), but Watson said the Web team didn't
stop there. It added site-specific details to the more general WCAG directive
and created a training document for the company's designers and developers to
apply to both internal and external sites.

In addition, some of the
bank's user-interface designers have been trained in the use of screen readers
so they can see the bank's external site from the perspective of a blind customer.
"We're not just trying to make the site accessible," Watson said.
"We're trying to make it a decent experience."

Like other companies Wells
Fargo is interested in exploring the use of DHTML and AJAX to create Web-based
applications that could offer an even better online experience to end users.
But Watson said that first the bank will have to figure out how to make the
new technologies accessible.

Finding the Time

Nate Koechley, a senior front-end engineer at Yahoo Inc., which has already
taken the AJAX and DHTML plunge, said learning to build accessibility features
into applications developed with those technologies is mostly an issue of finding
enough time, given the intense, almost frantic atmosphere of Web development.
"Preserving and enriching accessibility is just another constraint of Web
design and engineering," he said.

Koechley added that the
development team at Yahoo has a great in-house resource--Victor Tsaran, the
company's accessibility program manager, who is blind himself. "Now we
can go over to his cube and say, ‘Hey, does this work for you? Check it out,''"
Koechley said.

Mike Paciello, founder
of the Paciello Group LLP, a Nashua, New Hampshire-based consulting firm that
works to enhance the accessibility of software, said he is optimistic that the
process of making applications accessible won't lag with technologies like AJAX
and DHTML to the degree that it has with other technologies in the past.

"Technology that supports
people with disabilities is so far behind," he said. "Whenever they
start to get caught up, they get thrown back another five steps. [But] with
AJAX I don't think it will be five steps back because we already have a handle
on it. We're probably one or two steps back."

For Paciello, the lack
of a dynamic leader to raise awareness about the need for increased accessibility
remains the larger problem. And there's still much more work to be done, according
to advocates for people with disabilities. Sexton, for one, said that he still
can spend hours trying to figure out whether a Web site is just difficult to
navigate or not accessible at all. "It frustrates me no end," he said,
"and it makes me feel that I'm not able to do something that everybody
else can."